THE VEGETABLE CELL. 
383 
by subsequent observers, chiefly belonging to Germany, von 
Mohl, Nageli, Hofmeister, and others. 
It cannot be too clearly understood by the beginner that all 
vegetable tissues, of whatever kind, are formed originally from 
cells of the structure we are about to describe, and that all 
growth is the result of the multiplication, in some way or other, 
of these cells. There are plants of so simple a structure — Uni- 
cellular Algse and Fungi — as to be formed of but a single cell ; 
others, also Algae and Fungi, consist of but a single filament of 
cells ; but all the higher plants are aggregates of cells, infinite in 
number, which, in the more complicated forms of tissue, have 
undergone modifications in a great variety of ways. 
Fig. 1. 
Forms of cells ; A and B, from the maize ; C, from tuber 
of artichoke, after action of iodine and dilute sul- 
phuric acid; h, cell-wall; p, protoplasm; k, nucleus. 
The vegetable cell is a sac or vesicle completely closed on 
all sides ; the form of the cells may be easily recognised by 
placing under a comparatively low power of the microscope 
thin sections of potato, elder-pith, or a similar tissue, or in the 
semi-transparent leaves of Anacharis or Vallisneria, or those 
of Sphagnum , which consist of only a single layer. The cell 
represented in fig. 1 C.* is from the tuber of the artichoke. 
* All the woodcuts in the present article are borrowed, by permission of 
the English publishers, from the English edition of Sachs’s u Text Book of 
Botany,” the most complete and trustworthy work on Vegetable Morphology, 
about to be published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford. 
